best thing about My Bloody Valentine 3D...? It finally got an uncut version of the original Canuck slasher out on DVD. That's about it, tho'.

Look, I'm not one of those "remakes are bad, mmmkay?" stuffed shirts. I dug the redux of Dawn of the Dead, and if you catch me in a weak moment, I might even 'fess the same for the retread of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. At the same time, though, what do you really expect out of a flick written by the guy behind Jason X and hammered out by the director of Dracula 2000? As much as the extras ramble on about wanting to make My Bloody Valentine 3D a taut, unrelentingly tense, character-driven horror movie, it's a spookhouse at the county fair -- a blood-spattered campfest with eyeballs and pickaxes leaping out at you in 3D. If you're in a theater with a hundred other people, sure, it's a hell of a lot of infectious fun. In a living room with two or three other guys and the cardboard 3D glasses making everything look lifelessly green...? Not so much.

Oops. Tom Hanniger (Supernatural's Jensen Ackles) scored a plush gig at his father's mine without really knowing what he's doing, and he catches the blame for an explosion that trapped five miners under a couple tons of rubble. Dunno how many survivors there originally were, but when the rescue team finished carving their way through a month and a half later, there was just one left: Harry Warden, who was still alive and kickin' after butchering everyone who was left to preserve his own air supply. Flash-forward a year later. Harry slaps back on his old helmet and mask to carve his way through a gaggle of teenagers who figured it'd be a winning idea to party in that old abandoned mineshaft. Stab. Slash. Impale. You're, like, eight minutes into the flick and have already racked up a higher body count than most '80s slashers do in an hour and a half. The sheriff (Tom Frickin' Atkins) guns Harry down just before he can sink his pickaxe into Tommy Boy, and the sleepy little mining town of Harmony is safe again. Fade to black. Roll credits.

Oh! Wait. Leap

[click on the thumbnail to enlarge]

forward another decade. Valentine's Day is rolling around once again, and as Axel (Kerr Smith) -- the new sheriff in town -- fields interviews from nosy reporters about this grisly anniversary, it seems like just more of the same old routine. Only this time, Tom's waltzing back into Harmony for the first time since Ricky Martin topped the pop charts. He says he's there to sell off his dead father's old mine -- the lifeblood of the town -- but is that really why he's there? I mean, maybe he just wants to try to respark that old flame with his-ex-slash-Axel's-wife Sarah (Jaime King). The body count starts piling up once again now that Tom's breezed back into town. Could it be Harry Warden back from the grave, though, or...c'mon, this is a nod to '80s slashers, so you know how it goes from here. Lotsa red herrings. Lotsa bloodied, dismembered corpses. Lotsa...well, talking. Big finalé with an out-of-left-field reveal. Monkey die. Everybody cry.

My Bloody Valentine blows its load pretty early on. All but one of the most cacklingly twisted kills are churned out in the first few minutes, and once the flick's finished with its flashbacks and sets up shop in the here and now, there's a really long scene with a chick darting around completely naked the entire time, cowering as the miner whacks a dwarf into a fluorescent light with a pickaxe. C'mon, it's a hell of a lot of campy fun, and with so many other horror flicks these days either unrelentingly grim torture porn or neutered to score a PG-13, it's great to finally see something take a stab at recapturing the same sort of depraved rollercoaster ride of an '80s slasher...and in 3D too!

'Course, My Bloody Valentine makes the same misstep as an awful lot of vintage slashers: it's agonizingly boring whenever someone isn't being carved apart. Even worse, there's really only one memorable kill after the carnage in the motel room. Other than a yanked-off jaw being flung towards the camera in 3D, it's just routine impalings and folks stumbling onto oodles of disemboweled corpses. Even with so much of the flick set against the backdrop of a mine, there are hardly any tense, claustrophobic setpieces this time around. Aside from a late night chase in a supermarket, My Bloody Valentine sticks mostly to "boo!" scares that really only work in 3D.

The acting's like something out of

[click on the thumbnail to enlarge]

a local theatre production despite piling together a pretty recognizable cast, and not even stuffing Tom Atkins (!!!!) on the marquee can redeem how stilted and clunky so much of it is. The splatter may be in 3D, but the writing skews way more toward the one-dimensional end of things. The cast and crew rave about My Bloody Valentine being such an intensely character-driven flick, but...no. I'd have to thumb through my Big Movie Glossary to double-check, but I'm pretty sure that characterization means more than just having a bunch of actors stand around and yak for twentysomething minutes at a time. The movie really can't figure out what to do when it's not plowing a pickaxe through someone's skull, and no matter how they defend it in the commentary track, the eventual reveal of the killer is a huge cheat. The original My Bloody Valentine is a hell of a lot more suspenseful, sharply written, and better acted, and this campy remake isn't as deliriously fun as even the redux of Black Christmas from a few years back. It doesn't really try to be a horror flick, and it's ankle-deep in its own flopsweat as camp. Oh well. This obviously isn't a note for note remake, but there are plenty of nods to the original, from some tumble drying to heart-shaped boxes sopping with the red stuff to lightbulbs in the mine being smashed with a pickaxe.

What's good...? Tom Atkins. Boobs. Blood. My Bloody Valentine doesn't flinch away from the splatter, and to make sure everything packs a wallop in 3D, there isn't that sort of obnoxious hypercutting in the editing. It's not unrated on DVD and Blu-ray the way...oh, pretty much every other horror flick is on home video, but even with that overbearingly campy sense of humor and the cartoonish kills, My Bloody Valentine still earns its hard, blood-spattered R. I've gotta say that the scenes in the mine look phenomenal, although too many stretches of the rest of the movie look like cheap, poorly lit sets.

My Bloody Valentine 3D isn't a movie...it's an experience. Y'know, it's meant to be seen in a theater packed with frothing-at-the-mouth horror fans recoiling as a pickaxe is swung at 'em in 3D. That sort of hyperkinetic energy kept My Bloody Valentine screaming along even when the pace drags and the gags get more and more routine. That just doesn't carry over on Blu-ray, no matter how many sets of not-nearly-as-good 3D glasses are piled into that shiny blue case. The movie's pretty much completely green in 3D on video, and trudging through My Bloody Valentine without those 3D effects is like flipping the lights on at the Jaycees haunted house at the county fair: there's nothing remotely creepy about it in the dark anyway, but turning on the lights just shows how low-rent and lousy it really is. 'Sjust too bad it's this remake clawing its way to Blu-ray instead of the original. I'd shell out twentysomething bucks for that, but this remake...? Skip It.

VideoMy Bloody

[click on the thumbnail to enlarge]

Valentine 3D was shot on bleeding-edge 4K digital video, but the daytime soap lighting and the lack of the usual post-production knob-twiddling leave it looking chintzier than even a lot of direct-to-video flicks. Sure, the 1.85:1 image is ridiculously crisp and detailed, and it holds up unusually well under low light, but My Bloody Valentine's photography looks so low-rent that it's distracting, really. There are a couple of minor hiccups in the presentation -- distortion around a few scattered edges and even some moire in an inhumanly sheer top Megan Boone's strutting around in at one point -- but those are easily shrugged off, and the digital photography means there aren't any nicks, scratches, or flecks of dust in the source. I couldn't spot any compression artifacting or edge enhancement anywhere in the flick either.

This dual-layer Blu-ray disc piles on two versions of the movie. One is in anaglyph 3D, and there are four magenta-and-green glasses tucked inside the case. The 3D effects work remarkably well on Blu-ray, although there's some unavoidable ghosting, and the image is so slathered in green that virtually every other trace of color is drained away. There's also a flat 2D version, but My Bloody Valentine leans so heavily on its 3D gimmicks that once that's chucked out the window, the movie's borderline-unwatchable. On the other hand, its original palette is kept intact in this flat cut, and there's so much depth and dimensionality to the image that it's more like 2½D anyway.

Technically, My Bloody Valentine is teetering on being flawless on Blu-ray, but the distractingly cheap look of the flick and lack of color in the 3D version sap away a lot of the fun.

Audio
Like pretty much everything out of Lionsgate these days, My Bloody Valentine piles on a 24-bit, 7.1 DTS-HD Master Audio track. Sometimes the low budget does seem to creep in -- the dialogue in the hospital after Harry Warden goes batshit sounds hollow and poorly recorded -- but it generally comes through pretty well otherwise, and none of the screams are marred by so much as a flicker of clipping or distortion. The mix is packing a foundation-rattling low-end thanks to a couple of colossal explosions, the throbbing bass and massive stings in the score, and the hefty stack of kills. The surrounds flesh out an unsettling atmosphere in the mine, especially as one shaft starts to crumble early on. Scares like a tree branch plowing clean through a Jeep and a basket knocked over in a supermarket after hours are reinforced effectively by the rear speakers, and there's even some scattered directionality to the dialogue. Horror flicks pretty much always attack with spastic, hyperaggressive soundtracks, and My Bloody Valentine's sounds pretty damn great.

Also included is a French dub in Dolby Digital 5.1 alongside subtitles in English (traditional and SDH) and Spanish.

Extras
The only high-def extra on My Bloody Valentine 3D is a theatrical trailer, not that there's really all that much of interest besides.

Audio Commentary: Director

[click on the thumbnail to enlarge]

Patrick Lussier and co-writer Todd Farmer hammer out a commentary track that wastes so much time gushing about how amazingly wonderful everyone and everything is that they...y'know, don't really have a chance to talk about much of anything else. There are a few decent notes scattered around in here -- a hospital having to hire a crime scene cleanup crew to sweep up after one early sequence, an actress trying to stuff herself into her own dryer, and rattling off variations of a few different scenes -- but too much of it's empty backpatting to scream out for a listen.

Deleted Scenes(18 min.; SD): This pretty lengthy reel of deleted and extended scenes is a waste of time too. The original opening for the movie is bogged down by clunky exposition, and most of the rest drag on with redundant dialogue or characters quietly trudging around. With only one very short clip belting out any action and the rest too superficial to further flesh out the story or its characters, there really aren't any highlights here for me to rattle off.

Tom, Pick, and Harry(1 min.; SD): A marginally different alternate ending is also tacked on. It doesn't really change what happens so much as drag out the leadup to that One Last Scare a bit more.

Gag Reel(2 min.; SD): I'm usually not all that keen on gag reels, but this one's actually pretty good, alternating between the cast fumbling with props and Jaime King blowing one line after another.

Deep Inside My Bloody Valentine(7 min.; SD): Most of this making-of featurette is spent chatting about the grueling, claustrophobic shoot in a once-working mine, and from there, it dives into the texture and layers of this character-driven ::sarcastic snort:: horror movie.

Sex, Blood, and Screams(5 min.; SD): One of the only things My Bloody Valentine really gets right is its cacklingly gruesome splatter, and practical effects wizard Gary Tunnicliffe shows off the impaled, disemboweled, and carved apart rigs he and his team put together for the flick.

A second disc in the set serves up a 2D digital copy of My Bloody Valentine for iPods and that whole crowd.

The Final Word
I kinda had a good time with My Bloody Valentine 3D back when it was making the rounds theatrically. It's a terrible flick, sure, but piling into a packed theater with eyeballs and pickaxes being flung at me in 3D...it's an experience even if the movie itself really isn't so much. None of that carries over to Blu-ray, tho'. The 3D version is pretty convincing on home video but is heavily tinted green, and there's borderline-nothin' redeeming about the flat version of the flick with that novelty gutted out. Even with four sets of glasses packed in, this Blu-ray disc just doesn't come close to duplicating the theatrical experience. My Bloody Valentine at least belts out more in the way of blood and boobs (and Tom Atkins!) than pretty much every other straightahead slasher from the past few years, but even that's not enough to distract from just how stilted and clunky this whole thing is. I mean, I'm about as big an '80s slasher apologist as they come, and even I'd have to shrug and say Skip It.